The city, itself, is traditionally a military weapon, and is a 
collective shield or plate armor, an extension of the castle of 
our very skins. Before the huddle of the city, there was the 
food-gathering phase of man the hunter, even as men have 
now in the electric age returned psychically and socially to the 
nomad state. Now, however, it is called information-gathering 
and data-processing. But it is global, and it ignores and 
replaces the form of the city which has, therefore, tended to 
become obsolete. With instant electric technology, the globe 
itself can never again be more than a village, and the very 
nature of city as a form of major dimensions must inevitably 
dissolve like a fading shot in a movie. The first circumnavigation 
of the globe in the Renaissance gave men a sense of embracing 
and possessing the earth that was quite new, even as the 
recent astronauts have again altered man’s relation to the 
planet, reducing its scope to the extent of an evening’s stroll.